Bruno & Boots: Big Time Gangsters
by crimethinker
Summary: Stand-Alone! A few years in the lives of a couple of inseparable ruthless gangsters, who are individually more powerful than the rulers of most countries. Sequel to Bruno and Boots: Small Time Gangsters, but for an older audience and with a different genr


**Author's Notes**: I do not own any characters, places, or plots that occurred/appeared in the original Bruno & Boots series. All else is mine.

That's the important note. The unimportant ones are below. Feel free to skip them.

If you're wondering who Fishdick or anyone else is, then skim-read the prequel to this, Bruno and Boots: Small-Time Gangsters. It is NOT necessary to read that before this.

Of course, if you're too lazy, here they are: Macdonald Hall was the all-boys boarding school that several young men that appear in the story went to (Bruno, Boots, Mark are the obvious ones, but I may decide to throw in others as well). Bruno and Boots have been best friends (and gangsters) since their Macdonald Hall days. Mark Davies went to school with them, and even then he was the evil international playboy and gangster that he is here. Fishdick was the incompetent headmaster of Macdonald Hall, nicknamed that because his name is Sturgeon and because a student once took a photo of his penis and put it on every noticeboard in the school. Miss Scrimmage's Finishing School for Young Ladies is the all-girls boarding school across the road from Macdonald Hall. The name is redundant because Bruno and Boots killed Miss Scrimmage in the course of the prequel to this story. Cathy and Diane were the buddies of Bruno and Boots in the real books, and in mine are the sex-toys of them as well.

This story is only fanfiction in the loosest sense of the term: the characters & locations are so warped/changed in this story and its prequel that they're virtually stand-alone. But it still belongs here and not FictionPress.

* * *

"For God's sake, Boots!" yelled Bruno as he exited the spartan bathroom of the two-star hotel room they were staying in. "If you're going to pinch off a 10-inch floater into the toilet, the least you could do is fucking flush it!"  
  
"I tried twice, it just wouldn't go down," called Boots from the balcony, staring down at the beautiful sunset on Rome. Damn she's fine, he thought, staring at a tanned local woman walking down the cracked pavement directly below him, especially admiring the view straight to her fantastic cleavage.  
  
Italy really was unusual. It was inundated in the kind of public negligence usually reserved for third-world countries, slums, and ghettos, such as cracked pavements, non-working lights, and even bomb holes still unrepaired from the Second World War; it was still not quite trusted by tourists because of its legacy of gangsters and crime lords; and yet it housed some really fascinating history, such as the Roman town of Rome, with the Coliseum, and the Vatican, one of the smallest countries in the world, and some of the most beautiful buildings and areas in the world, and many, many beautiful people, which Boots really appreciated on that afternoon.  
  
"You asshole, then you fish it out and hurl it out a window!" exclaimed Bruno. He went to his bulging bag of military hardware, took out both M- 16s, and used them like a pair of giant chopsticks to take the turd out of the toilet water. Boots had let drop such a dry piece of shite that it didn't even spread onto the barrels as Bruno carted it over to the balcony and hurled it into the street. It actually bounced off the road before colliding with a wall next to a rubbish bin and came to rest a metre and a half away.  
  
Bruno switched his grip so he held both M16s in one hand and smacked Boots upside the head. "Disgusting asshole," he muttered as he went to put back the guns.  
  
It had been a year since Bruno and Boots had left Macdonald Hall and its crime. That meant that the pair had twelve whole months of solid crime under their belts. They were both 17, Bruno was 1 month away from 18 and Boots was 4 months away. Bruno had decided to grow a moustache and beard, but Boots remained clean-shaven, and both were tanned and muscly.  
  
Boots stared at a different sexy Italian woman as she walked towards him on the far side of the street. If he could be bothered he would go and seduce either her or some other fit woman, but he had done that during yesterday's plane ride over and during the morning, and he felt he needed some peace and quiet.  
  
Suddenly he saw something flash from a window ahead. After a split second he dived around the corner, seizing a Browning High Power from a bedside table. When a sniper round didn't sizzle through the air past him and he thought through the flash, he realised it was a sunlight-on-glass flash. Probably caused by someone opening a God damn window and reflecting the sunset. He laughed. Mark Davies' drilled-in reflexes were extremely useful in a firefight, but annoying as hell in calm situations.  
  
"What are you doing, Boots?" inquired Bruno as he entered the bathroom.  
  
"I just got spooked by a flash, that's all," said Boots. "Never mind me, I'm just paranoid."  
  
"So am I, Boots, join the club," said Bruno as he closed the door.  
  
Then Boots thought it would be best to check it out, just in case. The two- star apartment had a balcony, and that was it, regarding external light sources, so they generally kept the lights on all day. Boots walked to the bag of military hardware, took out a pair of binoculars, strode to the window, and crouched while peering towards the spot where he had seen the flash. He was unable to find it for a while until there was a second flash. He ducked again, and again it wasn't a rifle firing, so he looked around again and zoomed in with the binoculars.  
  
He was staring at a high apartment right next to the Vatican border. There was very little inside it, from what he could see of the background. Then his eyes adjusted to the light of the foreground of the other balcony.  
  
There was a man lying down on the floor of the balcony, staring back at Boots with a pair of binoculars. He was wearing civilian clothes and had a walkie-talkie at his side. Next to him was a sniper rifle with a huge scope. The man's binoculars flashed at Boots once more, then he flinched and mouthed what was probably an Italian curse when he saw Boots looking at him, and reached for his rifle.  
  
"Oh shit!" yelled Boots, the connections forming in his head. Earlier he had heard a cough from the stairs and was mystified by it. If the sniper was a hitman, he would almost definitely have shot Boots as he was ogling the women on the street below. Therefore he wasn't intent on his death, so either he was specifically going for Bruno - unlikely - or he was following rules of engagement. Which meant the government. The Italian police didn't have snipers, so it had to be special forces. The cough on the stairs wasn't a passer-by, it was more special forces. Which meant-  
  
"Hey Bruno!" screamed Boots. "We're being raided! Get out of there and get out of here!"  
  
"What?! Shit!" came Bruno's muffled cry from the bathroom, before he barged through the door and dove for the bag of guns, just as there was an explosion and the door to the apartment was blasted off its hinges.

ooooooooo

"Why did you have to set fire to the building, anyway?" asked Boots as he and Bruno were shepherded into Mark's limo by a very well-dressed chauffeur.  
  
Bruno and Boots were just finishing their 'education' in Macdonald Hall, having received full marks for all their courses because they threatened the teachers that marked the internal exams, shortly before having sex with Cathy and Diane in front of the entire graduation congregation. Mark Davies had just hired them to be his thugs. Bruno and Boots owned nothing except what they carried with them, as they settled themselves on the plush leather seats.  
  
"That room was the most reliable way of getting your fingerprints," said Mark. "You touched other things in the school, but it would be hard to guarantee that it is your fingerprint, assuming it isn't smudged. Can you think of anything else that definitely has your fingerprints on it?"  
  
They both thought hard. "Actually, I did a piece of work in my first year here," said Bruno. "Could you find it and destroy it?"  
  
Mark smiled. "Could we? How little faith you have! Of course we can, that's piss-easy. Anyway, we'll sterilise your parents' houses, and anywhere else you've been to alone, so Interpol will have no records to compare you with. I'll get some hacker to clear your Canadian criminal record, too."  
  
"Cool," said Bruno.  
  
"So, if you two are going to work for me, there's a few things you need to do first off," said Mark, taking two small notepads and four ball-point pens out of a hardwood cabinet fixed to the wall of the limo, as the engine finally started and they started moving. "Firstly, write down a list of all the things and places that need sterilising. Then, write a list of everyone influential who doesn't like you. Then a list of everyone who does like you. Then a list of people who are willing to do any kind of business with you. This isn't just for my benefit, it's for yours as well."  
  
Bruno and Boots started scribbling, but Bruno stopped. "Hey, do you have a grenade launcher or bazooka back here?" he asked quickly.  
  
"Sure do," said Mark. "Why, you think we're being tailed?"  
  
"No, I just want to do something with it," said Bruno. "And tell the driver to slow down."  
  
"Hey Driver, slow down a bit," said Mark as he reached under his seat and slid out a drawer. In it were four one-shot rocket launchers, a grenade launcher with three spare grenades, a machine-gun with one spare 200-round belt of ammo, and an assault rifle with four spare 20-round clips. "Take your pick," he said, smiling at their amazement. "What are you going to do, anyway?"  
  
"Blow up Fishdick's car," said Bruno evilly. He leaned over, took one of the rocket launchers, pressed the button that opened the sunroof electrically, stood up, took aim at Fishdick's car and fired. There was a WHOOSH! and the rocket drove through the windscreen, through the front seat, and detonated on the back seat, sending PVC flying everywhere.  
  
"Fuck you FISHDICK!!!" yelled Bruno. Boots stood up through another sunroof to participate in the jeering and catcalls that had started following the shocked silence. Fishdick ran out of his house swearing blue murder with his face contorted in pure loathing, cocking the pistol he had recently bought. However, Boots had the assault rifle in his hands, and he started putting rounds through his sitting-room window. He yelped and dove back inside. Bruno and Boots both laughed cruelly as they sat back down and closed the sunroof. They exited the school. Policemen were firing at then like crazy, but the driver didn't even bother using his defensive driving training or speeding up, because there was no chance of the policemen's 9- mils penetrating the armour on the car.  
  
"So, where are we going?" asked Boots.  
  
"One of the things you need to improve on before working for me full-time is your shooting," said Mark. "Your close-combat seems fine, as does your planning and people skills - I'll still train you for those, though - but from what I just saw, your shooting ain't that great. Bruno, you almost missed with that bazooka, and Boots, even if you were just trying to put rounds near him instead of killing him, that was appalling, even considering you were in a moving vehicle; one of your rounds went into the God damn physics block!"  
  
"So where are we going?" repeated Boots.  
  
"You're going somewhere that you can practise your shooting skills as much as you want without being bothered by local police," said Mark.  
  
"Hey, wait a minute!" said Bruno, looking through the heavily-tinted reinforced windows. "We're pulling into Scrimmage's! What are we doing here?"  
  
"We're picking up more people than just you," said Mark. "You aren't the only fresh talent in these two schools. Get armed, you might as well get used to it. The guns are below your feet." Bruno and Boots began opening all the drawers beneath their feet and were astounded at the array of guns and tens of thousands of rounds in the car. "Anyway, you'll be going to a little island in Hawaii that I own. I've set up several firing ranges on it. We'll be there for at least two months; as long as it takes, really, for you to be perfect shots with anything imaginable." The limo stopped, the engine quietly turning over. Mark took the grenade launcher, shoved in a high-explosive grenade, opened and stood up through the sunroof, and blew the front door of the school into pieces. They all exited the car and walked through the smoking hole that was the front entrance.  
  
They went up the stairs, making a beeline for the girls' dormitories. Bruno and Boots were unfamiliar with the route, as they had only ever shinnied up the drainpipe or used the underground tunnel to go to the girls' dormitories. They got there fairly quickly. It had been two and two-thirds years since Miss Scrimmage had been murdered and a woman in a coma had taken over the ruling of the school, and because of the latter, the school was the picture of - no, the definition of - chaos. Three girls and two guys were noisily bonking on the landing of the stairs outside the corridors to the girls' rooms, three of which were smoking spliffs while doing it. Three metres down the hall a guy and a girl were screwing against the wall, and all down the wall were posters of girls in the school, wearing very little or nothing at all, advertising their room numbers and hourly price, and posters of drug dealers in their school and Macdonald Hall, and their prices, and posters put up by the students at the boy's school saying what prostitutes they want that night, and their room numbers at Macdonald Hall.  
  
"To think this is all because of us," said Bruno in grand satisfaction.  
  
They pushed through the throngs of prostitutes, sluts, etc. and made it to a room number that Bruno and Boots knew all too well: Cathy and Diane's room. Mark barged in without knocking, Bruno and Boots following suit. Cathy, Diane, and two other sluts were apparently doing a nude photo shoot with some other girl as photographer.  
  
Mark grinned. "What luck that I found all four of you at once. I want to hire all four of you as my girls. At best you'll just be beautiful, wearing stuff so I can show you off as my wealth, sometimes you'll be seductresses for certain operations that I need doing, and at worst you'll be my whores. Do you want to be hired?"  
  
"Fuck off, it costs money to watch this," said one of the girls that Bruno and Boots didn't recognise.  
  
"How much will you pay us?" asked Cathy. "You realise that I already earn a hundred grand a year from being a prostitute, pin-up girl, and porn star?"  
  
"I was thinking of paying you half a million dollars Canadian a year. Excluding bonuses. Each."  
  
"Fuck off, wannabe, you don't have that kind of cash," said the other girl again.  
  
"Don't you know who this is?" groaned Diane in exasperation. "He's Mark fucking Davies! He's more loaded than half the A-list celebrities of Hollywood put together!"  
  
"I heard of him, but that's just rumour," she said stubbornly.  
  
"Really?" Mark said, opening a small briefcase he had brought with him. In it was dozens of really thick bundles of hundred-dollar bills. "This look fake to you?" he asked, throwing a bundle at each girl. This finally convinced the girl, who looked ecstatic.  
  
"Put some normal clothes on, that means not slutty ones, the ones that you let your parents see, and put a second change into a backpack or suitcase. We leave right now if you accept."  
  
"I accept!" cried every girl instantly.  
  
He nodded slightly and left the room, Bruno adjusting his hip holster as everyone went after him.

ooooooooo

The door of the apartment flew four metres, clattering along the floor, and hit the flimsy rusted rail of the balcony, knocking it and lots of cement clean off the building. Suddenly the air was full of noise: the special forces people grunting and shouting in combat bloodlust, the WHUMP of tear gas canisters being fired and the CLANG of them hitting the stone walls, the swearing of Bruno as he struggled with tangled gas mask straps, the clumping of boots as the special forces soldiers came in.  
  
Boots fired the entire of the clip of the Browning High Power at the opening of the short hall which separated what used to be the doorway and the front room, just to slow them down, not to actually hit them. He dropped the gun, ran to the sack of guns, and reached inside. As soon as the door was taken out, the power to the building had been cut, so Boots had no fucking clue what he would end up taking from the bag. He yanked out one item with each hand, one of which was distinctly heavier than the other. Barely a metre away, Bruno had done exactly the same thing, although neither was looking at the other, and they wouldn't have been able to see each other anyway.  
  
They both judged by weight and shape what object they were holding, backed up by their precise knowledge of exactly what was in the bag, as they both dove for cover in the next rooms. Boots realised he had grabbed the barrel end of one of the M16s and a grenade. Bruno had been far less fortunate; he had grabbed a clip for the M16 and a clip for the Browning High Power. Bruno went into the en-suite bathroom and Boots ran into the bedroom.  
  
The special forces soldiers were shouting one-word instructions at each other in Italian as they came in quickly, hugging the walls, staring through their gas masks down the barrels of their MP5s with the safety catch on full-auto. They swept through the fairly small front room fast and didn't find their adversaries, so they began paying attention to the other rooms. They didn't take any chances whatsoever; first thing they did was to put two grenades into each room, one after the other.  
  
Both of them barely survived that. Bruno was crouching under the sink, and the first grenade went into the bathtub. That blew the thing into smithereens, and knocked several bricks out of the wall. The second grenade also went into the bathtub and out through the hole in the wall, detonating on the roof of the car the soldiers must have travelled to the area in. Boots was even luckier. The first grenade went between the beds; Boots was on the far side of the room. Because several things were stored under the bed, including spare sheets and a folding chair, the grenade fragments didn't reach him. Then Boots sat up, expecting an onslaught by guns, when the second grenade came in, coming right at his head. He knocked it with his gun back out the door and ducked a split second before it exploded, dicing three of the soldiers, who were waiting around the corner.  
  
Bruno reached up, grabbed the Browning High Power on top of the sink, and leaned around the doorframe. He had been preparing to aim and fire, but when he saw one of them react blindingly quickly and turn away from the bedroom doorway and towards the bathroom, he ducked back again. The soldier fired half his clip through and into the doorway to the bathroom, and Bruno was very thankful that all the walls in this building were thick enough stone to stop sub machine-gun bullets, even the interior non-supporting walls. Several others did the same, reducing the bathtub, which was already in pieces, to a coarse powder. One of the bullets ruptured the bath valve, and it started leaking cold water very fast all over the bathroom floor.  
  
Meanwhile Boots had sat up again and fired several bullets through the doorway with his M16. He used the spare time this generated to grab yet another Browning High Power that he knew was on the bedside table behind his head and thrust it into his jeans pocket, then he fired a few more rounds at the doorway, and took out his grenade. He bit off the pin, closed his eye as the latch flicked off into his face, and tossed it through the door. He spit out the pin, steadied his M16 and ducked as the grenade skittered to a halt. There were urgent movement sounds as at least one person made to run away, then it went off. One piece of shrapnel traced a burning line down his shoulder where he hadn't ducked enough. He didn't even cry out, he simply flexed his shoulder as he got to his feet to tell if it had broken a bone, muscle or tendon - it hadn't - and then he ran to the doorway. It felt superficial; the shrapnel must have exited through the other side, because the wound wasn't getting hotter and therefore hurting more.  
  
He fired once at the wall in the hope of surprising his opponents, then started quickly moving around the corner. He saw the dining table had fallen over, and the room was filling with smoke. Not all of it was smoke from the five grenades that had gone off... suddenly there was a sharp pain on his eyes and in his throat and lungs. He yelled in pain and ducked back into the bedroom. He recognised its effects: CS gas. He began crying, but that didn't help at all. He could only bear to keep his eyes open for less than half a second at a time, so he only saw flashes of the doorway. If anyone came around the corner now, he would almost certainly be finished.  
  
Bruno was in much better shape than Boots, as he had managed to put on a gas mask right at the start of the fight. He had taken the torch they kept under the sink and turned it on, aligning it with his pistol. He leaned around the corner with one eye and his pistol/torch combo. He saw a man getting up from behind the wrecked dining table, bringing a submachine gun to bear. He didn't hesitate: he shot the man in the face. He leaned out a bit more, then intuition made him duck back again, just as another soldier fired at him, scattering bits of stone all over the waterlogged floor.  
  
The soldier reloaded in the space of one second and started advancing, firing one round at a time through the doorway to discourage Bruno from coming out. He kept coming. He kept advancing and kept firing, forcing Bruno to duck back very far around the corner. Bruno stuck his gun around the corner, ready to fire randomly, when the soldier shot it out of his hand. Bruno sat there, whimpering, as the soldier slowly stepped around the doorway, firing one shot at a time through it, getting closer with every shot. Then he stepped in front of the bedroom door. Somehow he wasn't aware that Boots was in the bedroom, because he paid it no attention. He had almost reached the critical angle where he could see Bruno when Boots, who only barely saw the soldier due to the smoke, the CS gas making him cry, and the darkness, finally shot the man in the back of the head.  
  
And then there was silence.

oooooooooo

There was silence as Bruno lined up his shot with the Russian-made Dragunov sniper rifle. Sweat dripped off his forehead onto the scope and off his bare forearms onto his combat trousers, but he paid it no attention. His arms were perfectly still. He had forgotten where everyone else was, although his instructors, Mark Davies, and Boots were all a metre away, either looking at his target through binoculars or looking at him. All that he was aware of was his target.  
  
Bruno decided that the time was right, and he fired.  
  
The bullet seared its trajectory across 800 metres of flat concrete 50 centimetres above it, and because the motorised dummy did not change its previous speed (walking speed) or direction of movement, the bullet hit the pineapple that served as its head, causing it to explode in a shower of bright yellow fruit, dark brown rind and deep green leaves.  
  
They were all on a little private Hawaiian island in the Pacific Ocean. Bruno and Boots had been firing sniper rifles all morning, first hitting stationary targets at two hundred and fifty metres, then upgrading to what Bruno had just defeated.  
  
They were both not only more skilled with guns after three months of training, they were much stronger. They had lived in a boot camp the whole time, doing a hundred sit-ups before breakfast and all that stuff, with no respite save for visits by Cathy, Diane, Wilhelmina (they called her Star instead, as an truncation of her surname) and Ruth. While Bruno and Boots slaved away, learning how to disassemble a Kalashnikov AK-47 and why super- elevation was necessary before firing a Stinger missile, the girls went to a palace that Mark owned to learn how to screw like professionals. They would both have felt affronted that they could be living in that kind of luxury but instead had to live in self-constructed bivouacs eating MREs, except that they were too tired to complain most of the time, and the rest of the time getting to have sex with the girls dispelled their grievances. (MREs are standard American military equipment, and are Meals Ready-to-Eat. Alternatively, the GIs know them as Meals Rejected by Everyone, because they taste worse than shit.)  
  
"I see you're now extremely good with those guns," said Mark, smiling.  
  
"Thanks," said Bruno. He would have smiled back, but he was too tired.  
  
"I think you've messed about with normal sniper rifles enough now," he continued. "Yeah, that's enough of the Dragunovs and the L96s. It's time I introduced you to the M82." He walked away. Bruno, Boots, and their instructors followed him to a different, much longer firing range.  
  
"Carl," said Mark.  
  
"Right," said Carl, "This is the Browning M82A1 sniper rifle. It looks like a light machine-gun, but it's actually a sniper rifle. It's a .50 cal, 12.7mm semi-automatic rifle with 11-round magasines. It has an effective range of a kilometre and a maximum range of at least two. It's similar to the L96, except it has a larger maximum range, it's bullets are much larger and are big enough to take down jeeps or helicopters, and it weighs twice as much."  
  
"Thank you Carl," said Mark. "Now, do you see the circular target out there?"  
  
Everyone looked.  
  
"I can't see it," said Bruno; Boots concurred.  
  
"That's because it's camouflaged into the concrete, and it's between 1100 metres and 1900 metres away. There are five rounds in the magasine. Boots, you have 90 seconds to find the target and put at least one round through it. Starting now!"  
  
Without pausing to think, Boots hurried to the sniper rifle.

ooooooooo

Boots hurried to the doorway of the bedroom and exploded out of it, barely able to see a thing because of the CS gas, both because there was so much of it and because it stung his eyes. After blundering around the apartment for several seconds and only barely remembering not to approach the balcony, he said, "Clear!"  
  
Bruno shot out of the bathroom, adjusting his gas mask and pointing his torch ahead of him. He went to the sack of guns and took out the other M16, now that he was able to see properly, and took out yet another Browning High Power. He took two spare clips for each and made for the front door.  
  
"Whoa!" said Boots, catching Bruno. "There's a sniper out there! If you go for the door, he'll shoot you in the back!"  
  
Bruno looked him up and down. "You don't have a gas mask and you're covered in blood," he said.  
  
"No shit! Agggh!" Boots screamed. The CS was so thick he couldn't open his eyes at all, and his lungs were burning with the pain, and the canisters were still farting out CS gas.  
  
"Where could we leave besides the balcony and the door?" he wondered aloud. Then he remembered how the grenade had punched a hole in the bathroom wall. He took another grenade from the sack, leaving Boots to sit on the floor and cry, went into the bathroom, unpinned the grenade, left it balanced next to the hole in the bricks, and legged it, pulling Boots into better cover from the bathroom doorway. There was a BOOM. Bruno was about to pull Boots into the bathroom, but then he decided to inspect the corpses of the soldiers.  
  
There were six corpses, all clustered near the bedroom doorway. They had night vision equipment and MP5s, and two of them had M203 grenade launchers, which they obviously used to fire the tear gas. They wore uniforms marked 'NOCS' in discreet places, such as behind the bullet-proof vest. Bruno recognised it: the NOCS was Italy's hostage rescue outfit.  
  
He heard police sirens in the distance, approaching fast. They would have to leave quickly. He took one of their MP5s and threw it towards the bathroom, took both of the man's spare clips and pocketed them, yanked Boots towards the bathroom, and dropped the MP5 onto the street below. Then came the tricky operation of getting a completely blind Boots to drop 1 storey into a bin he couldn't see and getting him to pick it up again so Bruno could do the same thing, but it was accomplished in 10 seconds. The police were getting closer. Bruno dropped down, retrieved the MP5, took out his car keys, climbed into the Ford Sierra he had been made to drive, and left surreptitiously.

ooooooooo

Bruno crouch-ran discreetly along a low brick wall, avoiding the gaze of one of his instructors twenty metres away on the other side of the wall. The instructor (whose name was Silver) didn't notice Bruno as he did this. Bruno drew one of his two 'weapons': a little rubber rod with a handle like a dagger, which he kept in a sheath full of green paint. He ran behind Silver's patrol route in complete silence, reached the corner of the building, and held up his dagger, on which he had attached a little mirror. The mirror showed that another sentry was right around the corner with his back to the wall, and stationary. He ran around the corner and drove the 'knife' right into the man's throat, covering his neck in green paint, and followed it up with a stab to the chest.  
  
The man (who was one of his instructors, named Howl), although surprised, nodded his understanding that he was 'dead' and quietly sat down, taking care not to make his paintball gun clang on the concrete. Bruno dragged him as quietly as he could so he was lying down parallel to the wall in the shadows, then moved on. He reached another corner of the same building. He looked around the corner: there were two of his instructors, Carl and Snape (so called because he looked like the character in the Harry Potter films), and two random grunts he didn't know. The grunts had paintball guns, but each instructor had paintball miniguns on emplacements. It was time to wait for Boots's role in the invasion.  
  
It was a paintballing exercise; everyone was wearing paintballing masks, but they weren't wearing thick clothing, so when people were shot, especially at close range, it would hurt, a lot. It had taken Bruno four minutes to sneak past the patrols. Boots was to activate five minutes after the start of Bruno's invasion. So Bruno waited.  
  
Bruno had nothing but the paint knife and a silenced paintball pistol. Boots was the diversion: he had taken a semi-auto paintball gun for defense, and a paintball minigun for putting down noisy fire on the sentries, to draw their attention. Both were dressed entirely in black. The sentries were wearing brown and beige clothes and paintball masks, and their guns were colourful. They were fighting for control of information inside the building: Bruno had no idea where the information would be: might be in a locked drawer, or in a safe, or in a secret compartment, or on some pieces of note paper on a desk, or even on a computer. Bruno carried a hacker's disk with him, just in case. The information was GPS co- ordinates of something on this island. Once he got them, either he or Boots or both would have to go there, depending on whether they were still alive or not. He and Boots had started on a boat a mile offshore, up-current of the island, and they had swam using scuba onto the island - their scuba equipment was lying under a sand-coloured blanket still on the beach that they had landed on, along with the sand-coloured over-clothes they had been wearing originally.  
  
Suddenly there was a gunshot (all the paintball guns had been fitted to fire blank bullets at the same time as the paintballs - the blanks were designed to be completely safe and therefore expensive, unlike normal blanks, which can injure people). Snape took a heavy paintball to the face: he went flying backwards and collapsed in a heap on the concrete. Instantly all the sentries took better cover and looked towards where Boots was firing from. He fired again: a paintball streaked over the shoulder of Carl. Once everyone had seen the second signature, they started firing like crazy at him. Boots stopped taking potshots and started roaring fire on full-auto, using twenty paintballs a second. Carl ducked as Boots aimed for his face and started blindly firing on full-auto with his own minigun, spraying a panoramic area with yellow paint. One of the grunts, after expiring his automatic paintball gun, ran to the other minigun. Bruno came up behind him and shot him in the back of the head, then shot Carl in the side of the head, then entered the building.  
  
He only had a few minutes before Boots' ammo for the minigun would run out, then his distraction would just be his rifle, which wouldn't be nearly as good, so he had to move quickly. Before he could search for the GPS co- ordinates, he had to empty the building of guards. He moved quickly and quietly through the entrance room, which had a desk close to the door and a couch against the wall, but not much else. There were no guards hiding behind the desk or anything. Suddenly he heard the sound of several feet pounding on concrete towards him, from inside the building. He decided it would be better to hide than to fight, so he moved back around the desk and crouched behind it, with his gun pointed at where the guards would appear, held in both hands.  
  
Three guards ran around the corner without noticing him. He steadied his aim further. They approached the doors, then ran out of them. Two were immediately hit by Boots, but one took cover in time. Bruno waited to see if the guard would come back in and to listen for more guards coming to his aid, and when he decided that neither was happening, he went through the doorway to the next room, just as the roaring of Boots's minigun stopped.  
  
He was in an office with three desks in it, all with computer monitors on them, and all of them were turned on. Bruno groaned; three computers could take a long time to hack into. There were also potted plants and stuff like that, and there was another doorway at the far end of the room, although that one was actually fitted with a door. He checked under all the desks for guards - there were none - and then checked for CCTV. There was a little camera in the corner of the room, which wasn't dangerous since Bruno was wearing a balaclava, but he shot it anyway, splattering the lens with paint. He went to the door and opened it. It was another room, again with three desks, again with three computers. He shot another security camera, checked under the desks for guards, and reloaded with one of his two spare clips even though he still had half a clip left, before setting to work.  
  
He checked the few pieces of notepaper of the desks for the GPS co- ordinates. Then he ripped apart drawers, unpotted the potted plants, lifted up computer monitors and their processors, checked behind the one picture frame that was in each room, destroyed the light fixtures in both rooms because it would take too long to disassemble them, smashed up pens in case the information was hidden inside them, and smashed open the draining grille on the floor. He didn't find it. He went back to the front room, gun up. Boots had stopped firing with the minigun, so now the gunshots were much more erratic. Bruno had to tread much more quietly, lest he be heard from outside.  
  
He trashed the front room as well, but he still didn't find the grid reference. So he would have to try the computers. He sincerely hoped that all the information would be on one network, because it was far too likely that someone would come back here later, and it would take too long to hack every computer. He inserted the hacking disk and started trying out possible usernames. His disk would generate a working password, as long as he could type in a real username.  
  
He typed in usernames as though on autopilot: administrator, admini, admin, adm, a, main, user, administrator 1... None of them worked for a while, then he got a hit on user007. He was in. He scanned the desktop and opened three Word documents there. The first two were fake crime-administration documents that someone had painstakingly typed, but the third had nothing in it save a GPS co-ordinate. He smiled, grabbed some of their notepaper, recorded the co-ordinate, and left the room.  
  
He managed to sneak out of the compound fairly easily, because it seemed that Boots had killed all four guards on the roof and half the guards on the ground: he only had to kill two guards from behind to leave right through the front entrance, since Boots had gotten most of them to chase him around the back. Once at the edge of the forest and satisfied that no one was around, he used the device that would make a hard-to-triangulate radio signal, which was Bruno's sign of 'mission accomplished, meet at RV 1'.  
  
Within seconds the shooting was abruptly reduced in intensity (as Boots stopped firing and did escape-and-evade). Bruno set off for RV 1, which was a thick clump of trees on the edge of a clearing, a kilometre and a half due east of the base (Bruno elected to use the dregs of the sunset as an indicator of direction instead of his compass). He encountered no guards, sentries or soldiers along his route. Boots turned up eventually. Then they set off for the GPS co-ordinate.  
  
They quietly clambered onto their escape boat, taking off their scuba equipment once on the deck. As soon as they were both on, the boat was away, diesel engine silent, with its black hull, deck etc. absolutely not giving away their position to the island, on which all hell was still breaking loose.  
  
Bruno stared at the small bands of soldiers searching fruitlessly for them and smiled. The GPS co-ordinate led them to the middle of the forest. They dug six inches down and found an unlocked chest. Inside the chest was a key. They assumed it was what they had come for, and so they sortied.  
  
They both finally took off their wetsuits and sat down, exhausted, on the bench on the deck. They didn't even leave any equipment behind, although that was definitely a minimal concern. Neither noticed that Cathy was standing in front of them both until she said, "Hey."  
  
They looked up. "Hey," they said in unison.  
  
"How'd you do?" she said.  
  
"Mission accomplished," Bruno said.  
  
She grinned. "Good. The test is over. You can relax." She took out a walkie- talkie. "Hey come in, people, come in. They've escaped the island. Game over." On cue the boat turned right around, heading straight back to the island, where they would be debriefed by the grunts, the instructors, and the watchers on the CCTV.  
  
"Well done, both of you," she said. "Stand up for a second, you need to see this." They both followed her to the cabin. "Look through the windows. It's full of food, your supper and breakfast, since Mark wishes that you spend the night on the boat to make it more realistic. It's also got two hammocks and a gas fire. But guess what: the door's locked."  
  
"Ah," said Boots, going for the key in his pocket.  
  
"Wait a sec," said Mark. Bruno and Boots turned around and stared at Mark, who had just come up from the lower decks of the ship. "You both forgot something."  
  
"What's that?" asked Boots.  
  
"It's not over until I say it's over," said Mark.  
  
"You said it's over already," said Bruno.  
  
"No I didn't," he said. "Cathy did."  
  
Boots put together Mark's hint instantly: he turned on his heel and lunged for Cathy, but she was no longer there. She was in the cabin, eating their supper, with the key to the cabin on the table in front of her. Boots ran to the door and tried it: locked, of course. He went to the window and yelled, "Open up, bitch!" She stuck up her middle finger at him, stood up, and closed the curtains. He turned, defeated, to Mark.  
  
"It's your own fucking fault," said Mark. "You should both be more vigilant, although in your defense, she is a truly gifted pickpocket. Now, this game's not over until ten hundred hours tomorrow morning. Your new objective is to not break into any part of the boat. Have a nice time learning your lesson." He went back into the lower decks, closed the hatch, and locked it, leaving them alone on the hard metal deck.  
  
It took a long time for Bruno to fall asleep: he was staring at Cathy, eating a feast. Boots fell asleep many times: but he kept waking from hunger.

ooooooooooo

Bruno's stomach rumbled slightly as he drove away from the hotel room, reminding him all too well of the lesson he learned so long ago: it's not over until it's over. So he kept checking behind, in front, to the sides for police or anyone else following, long after his instincts told him he got away clean.  
  
He pulled into a safehouse on the other side of Rome. He got out, hitting Boots to tell him to get out, since he was still barely able to see. Between them they carted the few armaments they had salvaged from the raid as they entered Mark's office, leaving others to thoroughly clean the car.  
  
"Get a doctor," said Bruno to a grunt, who immediately stopped helping clean the car and went off in search of their friendly doctor.  
  
Mark wasn't in the office, which was hardly a surprise, because he spent so much time travelling to his other operations around the world to manage them; indeed, it would have been more of a surprise if he were in. So they walked over to a telephone, and Bruno pressed the speed-dial for Mark's world-wide mobile phone. He took the receiver.  
  
He got to Mark after four rings. One part of his system was that if it took him more than four rings, he was being held hostage, had his phone bugged or otherwise unable to speak freely. In the background was the sound of women having sex.  
  
"Yeah," said Mark.  
  
"Mark? That you?"  
  
"Yeah, yeah, get on with it."  
  
"We just got raided by six guys with MP5s and a sniper. The apartment's captured, along with a bunch of the weapons and most of the ammo. Boots got CS'ed, and got hit in the shoulder. There was NOCS on their uniforms. The sniper had chances to shoot Boots but didn't take them. Later they tried to kill us with frag grenades."  
  
"Got it," said Mark, incredibly. "The operation continues anyway. Go get some replacement weapons off Meruk, an Israeli friend of mine. He'll meet you if you sit on the park bench on the north-west side of the Coliseum at six in the morning with a copy of the Figaro. The meeting will go on at six the next morning, in the back rooms of the tea shop to the north of the Coliseum. Go alone, bring no money but arrange for variable sums of money to be brought to the front of the shop when you ask it to. Be careful, I don't trust Meruk. You'll probably have to drop my name on him to stop him cheating you."  
  
He paused. "Their rules of engagement are pretty screwed-up if they let you live one second, then try to frag you the next. Maybe they were hoping to take you alive but not really expecting it to happen. That would probably mean they are the real deal and knew who you were, but behind them is a politician who wants them to make live captures. That suggests that they really were NOCS, but it beats me why they would use hostage-rescue instead of a hit team, unless they were short on manpower, which they're not."  
  
"Maybe they wanted to use people who were more used to being quiet than the military."  
  
"I didn't mean a military hit team, I meant a national-security hit team. The name slips my mind right now, but it would be a hit team from Italy's version of DIA or MI6 or DTS."  
  
"Maybe they wanted to be able to take credit for it for once."  
  
"Good point." Mark laughed, which startled Bruno; he'd never, ever heard Mark laugh before. "Your lives were just spared by bureaucracy and politics, my friend. Say thank you."  
  
Bruno stayed silent.  
  
"Anyway, I'll get my contacts working on how they found out where you two were. I told them to get back to me ASAP if you two were being raided or something that major, so I should have some information very soon." Mark hung up; he never bothered with greetings or farewells. Bruno hung up and turned around when someone knocked on the open door.  
  
"I'm the doctor," he said. "That's the patient, right?"  
  
"Yeah," said Bruno, motioning him towards Boots. The doctor swung his big box of A&E kit onto a swivel chair and stood over Boots, who was sat in the visitor's chair, looking like he was fighting a losing battle against unconsciousness. He took a quick look at Boots's shoulder under the torn, slightly burned clothes. One glimpse confirmed the doctor's and Bruno's worst fears: blood was spurting out of a small hole next to Boots's armpit.  
  
"Oh no," understated the doctor. "Help me move him onto the desk." They both took the swooning Boots off the chair onto the desk. "Be my assistant while I work. If he's still conscious, it will hurt, and I might need you to hold him down. But first, let's wash our hands." They went one at a time to the bathroom to wash their hands, then the doc began to operate.  
  
In with the short time frame they had, he decided to cauterise. Bruno got a fire going in the gas fireplace as the doctor started a transfusion drip. Bruno took the doctor's small metal bar and put it right into the heart of the flames along with a thermometer as the doctor cleaned the exit wound and started an intravenous fluid drip. Bruno gave the bar back to the doctor when it was the right temperature. Without delay he carefully aimed and placed it on the wound for a time. The wound hissed slightly as the skin burned and inflamed, cutting off the blood from its escape route. The doctor breathed a sigh of relief and Bruno turned over Boots, and the doctor took out his needle and thread. He cleaned the entry wound, then slowly began sewing it shut. (There was less of a hurry for the entry wound because a) it was smaller and b) arterial blood was not escaping through it.)a  
  
When the doctor had finished, he said, "He needs a while of rest," and left.

ooooooooo

Bruno and Boots reclined on La-Z-Boys, watching TV, with the naked Cathy, Diane, Star and Ruth sitting near them. It had been four months since Bruno and Boots had had sex with any woman, until four and a half hours before, when their training had finally finished. At that point, they charged over to Mark's palace and accosted the girls.  
  
The girls had changed. Their training regime was still going, although far easier than the boys' regime. First and foremost, they learned to fuck like pornstars, and they learned the art of seduction. They had also learned lockpicking, escape and evasion techniques, close-combat, and also how to operate and fire accurately one-handed guns (as had Bruno and Boots). Also they worked out every day to keep them looking good, they could put on and take off make-up in the blink of an eye, they were experienced dancers and strippers, they were good linguists, and they were very good pickpockets. Mark Davies only did hire the best.  
  
Bruno and Boots were also different. They were far stronger, for one thing: they were now musclemen in every sense of the word; each one could operate the M82 sniper rifle (weighing 13.4kg unloaded, with a length of 1.5m) standing up without the help of anyone or any support, not only efficiently and effectively, but easily. They were extremely good shots, and lined up shots so well that they could whip an M16 up from pointing at the ground to pointing forwards and put a hole through a head-sized target at 50m in under two-thirds of a second. Each could destroy a pineapple at 1.7km with a mounted M2 heavy machine-gun with a 16x monocular when given just 7 seconds to aim. Each could disassemble, clean, alter, customise, repair, and reassemble pretty much every small arm that is widely used in any area of the world, especially M16s, AK-47s, MP5s, Uzis, Browning High Powers, and Makarovs, and all of their variants. It's what happens when you spend four months straight firing guns. Not to mention each even knew how to use Stinger missiles, grenade launchers, and landmines.  
  
Bruno and Boots screwed the four girls with the ferocity of polar bears, having been deprived for so long. The girls found it a welcome change from bonking the soldiers around the palace, half of whom were ugly and most of whom were terrible in bed.  
  
Just as Bruno became disinterested in the TV and was thinking of having sex with Star again, Mark barged in. He almost smiled.  
  
"Glad to see you're getting comfortable after your training," he said. "Hey Ruth, get over here." Ruth obligingly walked over to him and got on her knees. "Bruno, Boots, your training may be over, but your employment's just begun. You're to go out to Detroit ASAP. There's some kind of situation with the drug dealers, I didn't really listen to Patrick, but anyway, he suggests using a pair of guys. Naturally, I thought of you two. Go find Patrick right now, apparently it's urgent. No, dammit!" he yelled suddenly at Bruno, who was plainly about to grab Star. "You can screw on the plane ride over, but right now you have to be briefed and equipped!" Bruno and Boots left the room quickly.  
  
Within a few minutes they had found Patrick's office, who was the head of Mark's drug business for the United States. The door guards didn't recognise the two, so they asked them their names. They gave them, and they were let through the door with a word of introduction to Patrick before the door was closed.  
  
"You two were sent by Mark, right?" asked Patrick.  
  
"Yeah," said Boots.  
  
"Okay then, he explained the situation?" he asked, making to leave the room.  
  
"No," said Bruno. Patrick sighed.  
  
"Fine, here's the deal. A guy named Louie was our local contact for the whole of Detroit. He mostly ran the drug selling, but he also sold guns and bombs. Anyway, he turned rogue on us two weeks ago. Seems he's not following our orders, he's stolen all the money he's earned for us in the past two weeks, he's getting his drugs and weapons from other sources now. He's rolling in the dough because we financed what he now thinks is his operation. Plainly he is an asshole. You two are to go in, along with a couple of our skilled bitches. Firstly you are to make sure he has in fact turned against us and it's not just some CIA smokescreen to get us to kill each other, then you are to either convince him to pay all the money he owes us and take orders from us again, or you are to kill him. A secondary objective after killing him, if you end up doing that, is to steal all the money he owes us and pay it back for him. You got that?"  
  
"Yes," they chorused.  
  
"Okay. Get acquainted with our 'temptresses'," he said when he was plainly about to say 'bitches' but they walked in through the door. One was black, the other white with black hair, and both were very beautiful.  
  
"There, that's way better," nodded the white girl approvingly.  
  
"He called you 'bitches' when you weren't in the room," pointed out Bruno.  
  
He had meant it as a joke, but the next instant she lashed out with her foot straight into the man's balls.  
  
"I AM NOT A BITCH!" she screamed. He collapsed onto the ground, grasping his nutsack in one hand and using his other hand to defend his face, moaning all the while.  
  
"Christ, what the fuck was that for?" yelped Boots.  
  
"I AM NOT A BITCH!" she yelled at Patrick again, oblivious of Boots's question, as she began kicking him in the back.  
  
"Damn, bitch, get off him!" said Bruno, dragging her away. She tried to do some judo move on him, but with all of his close-combat training, he was expecting it, and simply put her in a bear hug from behind and lifted her off the floor.  
  
"I AM NOT A BITCH!" she yelled, frantically trying to elbow him, pinch his arms, kick him, and bite him.  
  
"I am not working with someone as high-strung as her," stated Boots in disgusted awe.  
  
"She's usually fine," said the black woman. "Just don't call her a bitch, she has some kinda psychological problem with anyone who uses the word 'bitch' except to describe an actual female dog."  
  
"Sorry Patrick," grunted Bruno as he started hitting the woman's head against the ceiling, because her attacks were getting too close to his balls, and he wanted to disorient her.  
  
"Fuck you," whispered Patrick in reply, still in the foetal position on the floor.  
  
"It's way too likely that someone in Detroit will call her a bitch," argued Boots. "She'll go crazy in front of Louie and he'll be turned off, and she'll be useless."  
  
"Don't worry," said the black woman. "Stacy knows she has a problem with the word 'b-tch', and her tactic is generally to plant her lips around her target's before they get a chance to say, 'Hey, b-tch, how 'bout some lovin'?'" She put on a really stupid Southern accent for the last part, and she also refrained from saying 'bitch' completely.  
  
Bruno very suddenly knocked Stacy out cold.  
  
"Oops," he said.  
  
"Good thing you did that, actually," said the black woman. "Unless she falls asleep or something, she stays unhinged from the word 'bitch' for several hours. Oh yeah, and I'm Kiki. Pleased to meet you, Mr?"  
  
"I'm Bruno," said Bruno.  
  
"I'm Boots," said Boots.  
  
"Hello to you both," she said, shaking their hands in turn, Bruno having to hold Stacy's inert body in one arm temporarily. "Absolutely DO NOT say 'b- tch' when near her, even if she's asleep, or knocked out. If you do, she'll wake up really cranky. I'm not lying, she is a really nice person as long as you don't say that word. Shame your first impression of her was that."  
  
"I agree," said Boots. "Hey Patrick, where should we get our stuff?"  
  
Patrick was only just getting up. "Man, she's got the meanest ball-kick in the whole place," he said. "Why the fuck did you tell her I said 'bitch'?"  
  
"I didn't know she would go into ballistic mode that fast just for that," Bruno said. "Man, I'm sorry about that, really, I couldn't have known but I'm still sorry."  
  
"Anyway, come with me, bring her along," he said, slowly walking out the door.  
  
He led them off the palace part of this island onto a small speedboat. This he drove to another of the mini-islands clustered around the main island, on which Bruno and Boots had trained on. On the mini-island was a small aeroplane hangar, absolutely full to the ceiling, quite literally, with guns, all their ammo types, and all their accessories. The duo's jaws dropped. Even the whore was impressed, but Bruno and Boots much more so, because they knew exactly how much damage this much ordinance going off could do. If this warehouse went up, without a doubt the whole mini-island would go flying, and chances were the bullets flying everywhere would decimate everything within view of the island, including the palace, and kill every last bit of underwater life within view as well.  
  
There were six floors of walkways, sixteen freight elevators, and hundreds of workers, who all knew exactly where everything was. Boots began to feel dizzy as they all went up to the third floor to collect a box of 500 rounds of 9mm Parabellum ammunition and to the fourth floor for a box of 100 .50 magnum bullets. When they came down they discovered that some other workers had brought sixteen MP5 clips and eight Desert Eagle clips for them already. They loaded 480 rounds into the MP5 clips and 56 rounds into the Desert Eagle clips (a very tedious task), took the two MP5s the workers had already brought for them, took the two Desert Eagle magnum pistols they had also brought, stuck the MP5s and their ammo in a sports bag that the workers had brought as well, and left. During this time Stacy woke up, so Bruno didn't have to carry her. After this Bruno collected two of those one- shot rocket launchers (which he now knew were called 66s) and six frag grenades, while Boots went and took an M82 sniper rifle with three clips (33 rounds in total) and two scopes for it, one an 8x, the other a 4x night vision scope.  
  
After that they all got dressed for their mission and put a bunch of clothes in a suitcase. Then they got a load of personal money for food etc. and everything else they thought they would need, and they finally took off on one of Mark's private planes, bound for Detroit.  
  
At the other end came the easiest trip through customs they had ever experienced. A man walked over to them and demanded to look in their plane and in their cargo hold. A two-inch-thick wad of hundred-dollar bills was thrust into his chest. He looked surprised for a second, then gave them a sticker and waved them through.

ooooooooo

"Come in, come in," said the Italian waiter, beckoning Bruno into the back rooms of the tea-shop, after attempting to invite him in in Italian. They went through the kitchen and the storeroom and into the walk-in refrigerator. Although the temperature display said it was at 2ºC, it wasn't even slightly cold inside. Not to mention the fact that a tea-shop that didn't have meat or fish on the menu out front had no need for a walk- in fridge, and even if it did it was such a small tea-shop that the fridge would have been much larger than necessary.  
  
Inside the fridge were several men. All but one were Italians, also dressed as waiters, or as chefs, with suspiciously voluminous aprons. The last one was a through-and-through Israeli, right down to the Star of David on a chain around his neck. The latter was sitting on a metal folding chair, while the Italians stood up. The fridge was half-full of boxes labelled 'UNCOOKED BEEF', 'UNCOOKED CHICKEN' 'UNCOOKED FISH', but Bruno expected them not to contain any food, and sure enough, after he was patted down by an Italian, the covers of the boxes were lifted off to reveal mounds and mounds of guns. Boots recognised them all: there were Galils, Short Galils, Micro Galils (all of them were assault rifles), Uzis (sub machine-guns), Jerichos (pistols), GALAT'Zs and M89SRs (both sniper rifles). They were all Israeli weapons, Boots noted. He's not much of a patriot, is he?  
  
"Is this what you are looking for?" asked Meruk in accented English.  
  
"Yes, Meruk, it's exactly what I'm looking for," stated Bruno, "please, take them out of the boxes."  
  
The Italians got to work. Soon the floor was covered in guns and ammunition. Bruno began examining all the guns, even though he knew he would end up buying six original Jerichos (not the variants) with twelve clips.  
  
He was examining the Micro Galils when something jogged his memory. He felt the cool steel stock of one of the Micro Galils. Yep, he remembered a story told to him by Mark Davies himself, about-  
  
Bruno stood up and pointed at Meruk. "You're trying to cheat me!"  
  
All of the Italians dropped anything they were taking out of the boxes and brought Mini-Uzis out from their aprons. Meruk looked offended. "No I am not!" he spluttered.  
  
"Yes you are!" yelled Bruno. "You're trying to cheat me! These are not the normal Micro Galils! Normal ones have coal-fibre stocks! This one - no, all of your ones - have steel stocks! And the handles are too thin! These are the prototype Micro Galils, which were immediately discontinued because the handle goes hot while you fire and burns your gun hand! I will not stand for this shit! I'm leaving to tell Mark Davies that you're an asshole." He started walking away.  
  
Meruk gave a little scream and fell out of his chair. He got back on it quickly. "M-m-mark Davies?" he squeaked. "No! Please don't! I'm very sorry! No! Please! I promise I'll be straight with you! No lies, no cheats! Please! – Please?"  
  
Bruno pretended to consider it. "Fine, but I want you to give me those shitty Micro Galils for free, so you can't try to cheat any of my friends in the future."  
  
"All of them?" said Meruk. "20 MARs could earn me four thousand dollars! I refuse!" The MAR, or Micro Assault Rifle, was the Israeli designation of the Micro Galil.  
  
"Well then, I insist that you insulate the handles of them as best you can, and give spare insulated handles to those that buy them. Unfortunately I can't make sure you do that, so I'll just drop the subject. I want six Jerichos, twelve Jericho clips, all fully loaded."  
  
Meruk barked some orders at the Italians in Italian. They painstakingly loaded 192 9mm rounds into the twelve clips, then gave everything to Bruno, after (humorously) putting everything into 3 McDonalds take-away bags.  
  
"That will be 262 American dollars, please," said Meruk. Boots paid with two hundreds, a fifty, and a twenty, said "Keep the change," and left. Despite Mark Davies' warning, he brought in some money of his own, since he knew his order wouldn't cost much.  
  
He brought the 20kg breakfast out of the teashop, climbed into the car that had been waiting for him, and left. On the way to one end of Rome, when they rounded an obscure corner, he quickly got out, closed the door, and ran down a side alley, as the car continued on its original course. He reached another car, this time parked and uninhabited, took out the keys, opened it, started it, and left, towards the other end of Rome. The point of this system was that anyone watching or following would discover the license plate or the journey of a car that went to Mark's fake hideout. In the fake hideout were lots of fake guns, bags of flour instead of drugs, and fake gangsters who had never committed a crime in their life, save for the crime of throwing police officers off the trail of the real gangsters. Out of hundreds of fake hideouts across the world, 20 of them had been raided, and 2 assaulted by rival gangs, leaving the real gangsters, real hideout, real drugs, and real guns in the area alive and well. Mark Davies swore by this strategy of protection.  
  
"Breakfast is served," announced Bruno, dumping the McDonald's bags onto Boots's lap. He jumped, since he had been asleep. Then, "How many McMuffins did you get??"  
  
Bruno laughed. "I was joking, it's the pistols," he said, taking them out. "I ended up getting Jerichos. The guy only sold Israeli small arms, he must've worked for them at some point, or he has friends that work there currently."  
  
"Dammit, Jerichos are shit," murmured Boots. "Browning High Powers are way better. We should never have lost them. How did they fucking find us?"  
  
Bruno 'mmmed' in agreement.  
  
"So, the plan stays the same?" asked Boots.  
  
"Mostly," said Bruno. "I think now would be a good time to acquaint the bitches with their new weapons. Are you able to stand?"  
  
Boots leaped to his feet. "Of course I am. Besides the slightly ruptured blood vessel in my arm, the damage was really clean, and really minimal. It's had a day and a half to heal, and since I've been well hydrated and had little exercise, blah blah blah, medical advice from the doctor, I'm ready for field action again. Though it hurts slightly to twist around too fast."  
  
They walked out of Boots' bedroom. All six girls had already gotten up and were putting on their clothes and make-up. All six looked like Latinas, to blend in with the area. All six were sexy. And all six deadly.  
  
"Hey there, girls," said Bruno. "When we got raided, we lost most of the Browning High Powers. So I went out and bought a bunch of other guns: six Israeli Jerichos."  
  
"But those are terrible," said two of the girls at the same time, though one had an American accent and the other an Italian one. Both of which were putting on eyeliner at the same mirror. The American one was named Rachel, the Italian one was Monica.  
  
"They're like fairground air pistols," said another one with an English accent, doing up the clip on her bra. Her name was Claire, and it was obvious to Bruno and Boots, who had worked with her before, that she was a blonde Caucasian that had sprayed on a lot of fake tan and dyed her hair black. However, because of her great skill at changing her appearance, she looked like a pure-bred Latina. Except for her eyes: they were a bright, clear blue, but that was just because she was the last to get up, and hadn't gotten around to putting in her coloured contacts yet.  
  
"Damn right," said Boots, "but hey, you can't exactly hide a mini-Uzi up your skirt or in your bra, and the guy didn't have any Micro Uzis or Uzi Pistols, or any non-Israeli weapons, so you're stuck with it. Besides, you'll be at point-blank range, even a miss will probably be enough to kill them."  
  
"Anyway, the plan's changed slightly," said Bruno. "They got the hotel room I was going to fire from, so we're moving the location from that street to the cross-roads at the end of it. Boots and I will sit at the park bench. I'll have a newspaper, Boots will be playing the cello."  
  
"What the fuck? I can't play the cello," said Boots.  
  
"Fiona here can play the cello," he said. "She'll teach you how to make three notes, the last drawn-out, as the end of some famous piece of music, since that's all you need to do. We'll buy a shitty cello at some thrift store around here, or maybe a stolen one from the black market. Anyway, if you haven't already guessed, the point of the cello is that we can store the M16s in the cello case. Boots, you'll pretend to put the cello away, when actually you'll get out the M16s. You ready them both behind my newspaper and hope there aren't any bystanders over my shoulder willing to scream bloody murder."  
  
"So, aside from the location change, our involvement stays the same?" asked Georgina, who had brown hair and pink skin normally, except that like Claire, she had metamorphosed into a Latina. She was putting in her coloured contacts. "And what if the NOCS know what we're planning to do? Suppose that you take the M16 given to you by Boots, drop the newspaper, stand up and fire a few rounds at the car, and you get shot to pieces by the police officers who had until then hidden in civilian cars?"  
  
"Quite frankly, if they know what we're planning to do, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference," Bruno shrugged. "I planned this operation based on the fact that they would know we were going to attack them. I always expected them to have a car full of cops trailing the target. We can only hope that our info on the driver was right. Besides, the possibility of a car full of cops is the reason why we have Monica and Vivien carting sawn-off M203s in their handbags."  
  
"We were lucky they were stored in this building instead of the hotel room," noted Boots.  
  
"Won't they find it odd that a person playing a cello is sitting right next to someone reading a newspaper?" persisted Georgina. "And what if they raid this building, or more importantly, the other building?"  
  
"Fuck it," said Bruno. "Anyway, hurry up, Claire, we said we wanted to see your clothes for the op tomorrow morning, and we meant now."  
  
"Oh, piss off," muttered Claire, finishing her nail polish and putting in contacts far more quickly than Bruno thought possible.  
  
"Okay," said Bruno, as he and Boots sized them all up. All six were completely dressed as they would be for the operation the following morning. Four of them looked fairly normal, although their clothes showed just slightly too much cleavage or smooth leg to be entirely normal. The other two were most of the way to becoming prostitutes, with more than half of their breasts showing and their nipples barely covered up, with their entire stomachs showing, with their miniskirts covering less than half of their thighs, and with heavily applied make-up. This was a conscious decision of Boots's, who had ordered the girls what sort of things to wear.  
  
He wanted the beautiful women, especially the two sluts, to distract the men in the cars, especially the drivers (their info on the target's personal driver told them he was a pervert). But at the same time, they didn't want to seem suspicious. So, while Bruno would have preferred his distraction to be six naked lesbians having sex, that was far too audacious to be believed, and six women wearing string bikinis was still too noticeable to be believed. So he decided to have six beautiful but otherwise normal women in the aforementioned clothes standing at the location, protesting the Pope's reinforcement of anti-abortion sentiments that had happened the day they had left Mark's headquarters at Hawaii. Protests were very common in Rome, what with all the tourism causing problems and the Pope saying things, even without world events and crime, and hopefully wouldn't alert the target's bodyguards.  
  
"Excellent choice of outfits, girls," said Boots.  
  
"Yeah, great," echoed Bruno. "I didn't know you had a tattoo."  
  
"Had that done last year," said Rachel, who was dressed as a slut, and therefore the butterfly tattoo on her left side stood out. "I also have a heart on my ass, from two years ago."  
  
"I knew that," said Boots, grinning like a shit-eater.  
  
"Course you did, you screwed me on the plane ride over," she said indifferently. Bruno looked surprised.  
  
"Anyway, show us the locations of the items you'll be carrying," said Boots. All of the girls had handbags, which was where they all put their spare clip. The loaded pistol went taped to their thigh under the skirt, except for the two with miniskirts, who also put it in their handbags. The two M203s were in Monica's and Vivien's handbags. Plus all six girls carried cans of mace, so if some drunk stumbled up to them right before the attack and tried to feel them up in front of the target, they could fight back and defeat them in a natural and usual way without being suspicious, although it would still probably trigger the bodyguards' reflexes and make them ready their weapons.  
  
Timing was everything. All eight people hoped that the six girls would distract as many of them as long as possible while Bruno suspiciously stood up in front of the cello case with a fully-unfurled broadsheet newspaper. Then Bruno and Boots were hoping to put a full-auto clip through the car's (or cars') windows with their A1-model M16s before any bodyguard could bring his weapon up.b Then, as the guards got ready to shoot back at Bruno and Boots, the girls would come out of cover from the other direction and shoot anyone remaining alive in the cars from three feet away. The M203s would only come out if any target car had four people or more in it, or if any target car was escaping. No one liked using the M203s at such close quarters, especially since they had sawn them off very crudely, which may have meant the grenades would fly out of the launch tube thirty degrees or more off course, or detonate early because they collide against the bent edge of the gun. Of course, this was just speculation.  
  
"Enough of us, how will you two be equipped?" said Vivien.  
  
"Well, I'll be wearing a cheap suit-" Bruno began.  
  
"You hypocrite!" she accused. "You tell us to get fully dressed, then you don't do it yourself?"  
  
"Fine, but it'll take a minute," conceded Boots. "Come on, everyone." He led the way to his own bedroom, where he stripped quickly. He took some normal clothes out (a short-sleeved shirt and some jeans), slashed them with a knife, ripped them, and washed them in dirt. He spread on some mud for good measure, then pulled them on. He covered his face with dirt, and shook a load of it into his hair. He then cut the knees out of his trousers and covered his actual knees in dirt, dust and mud. He then covered his feet in the same amount of dirt, dust and mud. After all that, he looked like a regular tramp. After that, everyone followed Bruno to his room. He took off his clothes and put on a cheap suit that he had bought the day before, and followed it up with a cheap pair of socks & shoes and a cheap tie. He even put on a hat. Boots remembered that he would need a hat for passers-by to put change in and went out to buy a hat. Neither Bruno nor Boots had any weapons on them for the op, although each carried a spare clip for their M16s: Bruno's was in his inside jacket pocket, Boots's was in the cello case to begin with, and after that he would transfer it to his jeans pocket. Their M16s were, of course, going to be stored in the cello case. 

To be continued...

Endnotes:

a - Can you tell I know very little about medicine?

b - I specifically say it's the M16 Alteration 1 model (M16A1) because the original model went out of production and the M16 Alteration 2 model (M16A2) has no full-auto capability. I researched guns WAY too much for this story.


End file.
